The Common Now

Abstract

It’s time detensers stand up for themselves and challenge the claim that experience favors tenses. After arguing that there is no "experience of the present" as contemporary metaphysicians conceive it, the paper turns to the main topic: explaining why people have the powerful intuition that there is a mind-independent Now and don't believe the same about the spatial Here. The paper offers a new theory explaining this difference. Oddly, given the central role temporal experience plays in philosophy of time, empirical work on time perception is virtually absent from this literature. When this neglect is rectified, one sees resources emerging in recent experiments in cognitive neuroscience and psychology that bear on the problem. If I am right, we already have enough information to fill out significantly the best explanation of the difference between the Here and Now.